Helen Wicks Works | Alive & Well Productions - (SF International Arts Festival)

Two Shows! Friday, May 2nd @8pm & Sunday, May 4th @3:30pm.

HELEN WICKS WORKS: Radio Vision, a solo choreographed and performed by Helen Wicks, synthesizes a decade of ancestral research on Helen’s great-grandfather, Hollywood music supervisor Joe Gershenson, and a conversation she had with music composer/producer Quincy Jones in 2018. The piece includes a live rendition of a 1914 composition for cello and piano by Nadia Boulanger performed by Ami Nashimoto and Keisuke Nakagoshi and a recorded sound collage by Simon Linsteadt that samples Boulanger and some of her students like Quincy Jones, Igor Stranvisnky, and Phillip Glass. Radio Vision weaves ancestral and cultural roots in Yiddish theater with the origins of talkies and broadcast television. It moves from the first orchestras on the radio to early Hollywood soundtracks. The dance is a movement mosaic that illuminates ancestral and popular culture’s origins while exploring technological advances that have led to music and entertainment on a mass scale. Collaborating Artists: Ami Nashimoto (cello) and Keisuke Nakagoshi (piano).

ALIVE & WELL PRODUCTIONS: Composed by Kian Ravaei and choreographed by Annie Kahane, The Four Seasons of Hamadan is a duet for live violinist and dancer that interweaves Persian and Jewish music and dance traditions to express intercultural harmony. Premiered in February, 2025 (Los Angeles), this project blends folkloric forms from the artists’ respective heritages and reimagines that material through a contemporary lens. 

The Four Seasons of Hamadan is performed by Yvette Holzwarth (violin) and Kate Myers (dancer), and was funded by a grant from The New Music USA.